Networking combined with device mobility has created unique opportunities for users. A user can use a device from virtually any location and connect to his preferred network for purposes of accessing desired services. This convenience has also presented a number of challenges for the users.
Take for instance an employee of an organization who works from home in the evening. When the employee boots his/her computer a connection is made to the Internet. The employee may be working on a personal or a confidential document. At some point, the employee may accidentally or deliberately, via a mouse click or keystroke, issue a print command. Since the print buttons on many applications may not even bring up a print dialogue box, the employee may print the document without even realizing it. Furthermore, even if the employee realizes that the print job was sent, it may be too late to cancel the print job. If the print job was sent to a remote printer, the employee will not able to manually stop the printer or for that matter may not be able to get back to the office before the print job is discovered and picked up by another employee of the organization.
This problem can be even more catastrophic for consultants who work at a particular customer site for a period of time and access printers at external companies during that period of time. When the contractor leaves the site, if the contractor does not remember to re-configure his/her default printer, trade secrets of another customer may be inadvertently discovered by a competitor.
It is also noted that any remote service configured and used by a device can experience this same type of problem as described above with the printer service example.